Legislative language exhibits some characteristics typical of languages of administration that are particularly prone to eliciting ambiguities. However, ambiguity is generally undesirable in legislative texts and can pose problems for the interpretation and application of codified law. In this paper, we demonstrate how methods of controlled natural languages can be applied to prevent ambiguitie...

Based on a modified grounded theory approach, in this study, we sought to elucidate the nursing care process used to guide psychiatric inpatients in long-term seclusion towards release from seclusion. Participant observations and interviews were conducted with a total of 18 nurses from three long-term psychiatric wards at two institutions from September 2011 to November 2012, to collect data on...

Coherence and alignment of the legislative language highly contribute to the quality of legislative processes, to the clarity of legislative texts and to their accessibility. DALOS aims at ensuring that legal drafters and decision-makers have control over the multilingual language of European legislation, and over the linguistic and conceptual issues involved in its transposition at national le...

Economic unions, such as American states, Canadian provinces, or EU countries, face the problem of how to allocate union-wide corporate profits among its individual members when each member retains some taxing authority. This paper studies the normative properties of two common types of allocation mechanisms, separate accounting and formula apportionment, when firms have private cost informatio...

This study was designed to assess jury decision-making for 289 participants reading a medical malpractice vignette as a function of participant type (undergraduate students or jury panelists), punitive damage award apportionment (none, half, or all to the plaintiff), and compensation previously assigned to the plaintiff (low, medium, or high). We found several sample differences. Overall, jury ...

The European Commission recently proposed to move towards a consolidated tax base for European multinational companies, to be allocated across EU member states through a system of formula apportionment. This paper argues that while the Commission’s four alternative blueprints for company tax reform may reduce existing problems of transfer pricing, they will also create new distortions as long a...

Many learning systems face the problem of temporal credit allocation: the proper reinforcement of activities that do not directly result in need satisfaction or external reward but are nevertheless essential precursors to such outcomes [Wilson]. Therefore, the development of an appropriate credit apportionment scheme for adaptive rulebased systems is considered to be one of the main issues in m...